Some time in the next 24 hours I expect that Catallaxy Files will be moved from its current home at WordPress.com to a server I operate. This will involve some disruption, which I will aim to minimise.

Essentially, while this site (catallaxyf.wordpress.com) will remain as-is, the proper address of catallaxyfiles.com will begin to redirect to the new server instead of to here.

Posts and comments that have been made here will be transferred to the new server.

To avoid confusion, I’d ask you all to defer from commenting until the move to the new server is complete. You can go directly to the new server now, if you wish; its direct name is catallaxyfiles.ozblogistan.com.au.

As for recovering the archives, c8to has advised that unfortunately the original database is not available. I have been working on a screen-scraping script, but it is slow and fiddly going. I will keep you all up to date.

Additional: I have tried to lock comments temporarily to prevent any bon mots getting lost in transit.

In March, there was extensive media coverage (e.g. in the Guardian Australia) of shadow assistant treasurer Andrew Leigh’s company tax research which found companies paying lower effective company tax rates (i.e. actual tax paid/profits) did not create more jobs than those paying higher effective tax rates, and may actually create fewer jobs. The research paper was published in Economic Analysis and Policy (EAP), the online journal of the Economic Society of Australia (QLD) of which I’m Vice President, although this is a personal comment on my part, and I am not on the editorial committee of EAP.

I am very pleased that RMIT’s Sinclair Davidson has converted his critique of Andrew Leigh’s paper, originally published at Catallaxy Files, into a submission to EAP. Davidson’s paper has been published along with a reply by Andrew Leigh, which in my view doesn’t effectively counter the major criticism Davidson makes, that…

The indefatigable Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama at Huntsville is the first to declare the global temperature anomaly for December 2017. As Fig. 1 shows, in the 39 years 1 month from December 1978 to December 2017, the planet has warmed by half a Celsius degree. But that is equivalent to 1.28 C°/century, or little more than one-third of the 3.3 C°/century predicted with “substantial confidence” by IPCC in 1990 and also by the fifth-generation general-circulation models of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project in 2013.

Fig. 1 The least-squares linear-regression trend on the entire UAH satellite shows monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset shows warming at a rate equivalent to just 1.28 C°/century from December 1978 to December 2017.

Is the rate of global warming rising inexorably? The answer is No, as Fig. 2 shows:

Pete Boettke from Coordination Problem, formerly The Austrian Economists, posts on the application of research findings from Katrina and other disasters to Haiti. The bottom line is that recovery from disaster is just another example of development and the same rules apply.

Two of the lead researchers in this project were Russell Sobel of West Virginia University (a leading scholar in empirical public choice) and Emily Chamlee-Wright of Beloit College (a leading scholar of qualitative research in economic development). I asked both if they would share what they thought were the main lessons from their study of Hurricane Katrina for how to deal with the tragedy in Haiti.

Russ Sobel replied: “Pete Leeson and I argue in our Katrina work that the role of government after a disaster is similar to their proper role in normal times. Protect rights, create law and order, and let markets get to work in delivering and allocating goods and services. (emphasis added) The stories I’ve heard about the looting and lawlessness there, similar to Katrina, show how the government is failing to do it’s basic job yet again. After Katrina not only did the government fail at this job, but then it also infringed on the market’s ability to work–a double whammy.”

Emily Chamily-Wright replied: “The theme we ought to hit is “what can outsiders do to tap the capacity of civil society?”. This advice is rather general and abstract, but that is part of the point. Official relief providers can extend their effectiveness by identifying community networks and leaders within those networks that can be the source of local knowledge, authority, and habits of association that can be pivotal to rescue operations, administration of relief and taking the first steps toward recovery.”

Catallaxy has moved. Please comment on this post here.
Tim Lambert points us to this excellent analysis by John Nielsen-Gammon and the Glaciergate story is perhaps even worse than we first thought. This is not just a simple error or transcription problem.

the available evidence indicates that the IPCC authors of this section relied upon a secondhand, unreferreed source which turned out to be unreliable, and failed to identify this source.

Nielsen-Gammon also finds a remarkable consistency between the IPCC statement (on the left in the panel below) and a statement at the India Environment Portal (on the right in the panel below).

The inartfulness of the transfer of verbiage from the IEP to the IPCC explains the first word (“Its”) of the second IPCC sentence: there’s no single noun to which “Its” can refer in the IPCC quote, but in the IEP quote, “Its” refers to “The glacier” (poor English, but singular) in the previous sentence. To me, this is like a fingerprint: I am convinced that the IPCC author paraphrased the IEP article and leaving off or altering the references.

It just doesn’t look good at all.

He is also able to track down a potential origin of the 2035 date (emphasis added).

According to Kotlyakov, the loss of 80% of the extrapolar glaciation on the Earth’s surface will be by 2350, not 2035. And even after 2350 there will still be some glaciers surviving in the Karakoram, the Himalayas, and in parts of Tibet.

There are other errors too.

Recall that the IPCC quote referred to a table. The table lists the retreat of 8 Himalayan glaciers. Only one such retreat is as stated in the WWF report. Another retreat, recorded as 2840 m from 1845-1966, is listed as a rate of 134 m/yr, but the actual rate is 23 m/yr. Whoever did the calculation for the IPCC divided by 21 years instead of 121 years! The rest of the values are from other, unnamed sources.

Lambert’s own analysis is also quite interesting. He looks at the reviewing process itself.

There was no cite at all for the claim and more than one reviewer noted that a citation was needed. If the chapter authors had followed this comment, all would have been well:

I am not sure that this is true for the very large Karakoram glaciers in the western Himalaya. Hewitt (2005) suggests from measurements that these are expanding – and this would certainly be explained by climatic change in precipitation and temperature trends seen in the Karakoram region (Fowler and Archer, J Climate in press; Archer and Fowler, 2004) You need to quote Barnett et al.’s 2005 Nature paper here – this seems very similar to what they said. (Hayley Fowler, Newcastle University)

But the response was this:

Was unable to get hold of the suggested references will consider in the final version

Instead the authors added to a cite to this WWF report, which says

“In 1999, a report by the Working Group on Himalayan Glaciology (WGHG) of the International Commission for Snow and Ice (ICSI) stated: “glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the livelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high”.

And here we see the perils of lazy citing. The IPCC report should have cited the WGHG/ICSI report, but the authors weren’t able to get hold of it. If they had, they would have found that it doesn’t say anything about the glaciers disappearing by 2035. The WWF report authors hadn’t seen the WGHG report either, but relied on this New Scientist story, by a reporter that hadn’t seen the report either, but had talked to the author of the WGHG report.

So Lambert concludes its all about lazy citation. But that isn’t what he has found. The IPCC state that they are unable “to get hold of the suggested references” but that isn’t the WGHG/ICSI report they can’t get hold of. The reviewer is suggesting they get hold of a paper in Nature. Furthermore the reviewer is saying that the peer-reviewed literature is suggesting that glaciers are expanding not melting away. The IPCC ignore that, claim they can’t find a reference in Nature, and then publish the false information anyway.

The Rudd government’s White Paper into the CPRS at page 2-3 contains this statement now know to be false.

Melting of the Himalayan glaciers. These glaciers feed several of the most important rivers in Asia, which underpin the livelihoods of some of the most populous nations. Decreased freshwater availability could affect more than a billion people in Asia by 2050.

While the government has a disclaimer on the paper, nonetheless the greatest moral issue of our time can’t be based on a lie.

It seems the Garnaut Report also swallowed the Himalayan glacier story. At page 99

After the polar regions, the Himalayas are home to the largest glacial areas. Together, the Himalayan glaciers feed seven of the most important rivers in Asia—the Ganga, Indus, Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze and Huang. These glaciers are receding faster than any other glaciers around the world, and some estimates project that they may disappear altogether by 2035 (WWF Nepal Program 2005).
Rivers fed from glaciers are projected to experience increased streamflows over the next few decades as a result of glacial melt, followed by a subsequent decline and greater instability of inflows as glaciers begin to disappear altogether, leaving only seasonal precipitation to feed rivers (WWF Nepal Program 2005). Glacial retreat can also result in catastrophic discharges of water from meltwater
lakes, known as glacial lake outburst floods, which can cause considerable destruction and flooding downstream.

The melting of the Himalayan and Tibetan plateau glaciers illustrates the complex nexus of climate change, economic security and geopolitics. Well over a billion people are dependent on the flow of the area’s rivers for much of their food and water needs, as well as transportation and energy from hydroelectricity. Initially, flows may increase, as glacial runoff accelerates, causing extensive flooding. Within a few decades, however, water levels are expected to decline, jeopardising food production and causing widespread water and power shortages.